Zhiwei Li's Future Life Roadmap | Generated by AI
Question: Based on Zhiwei Li’s resume, what should he do in the next few years to live a better life and achieve more in various aspects of life?
Answer:
After carefully reading your resume, here is a comprehensive, personalized roadmap for the next few years — covering career, finance, health, relationships, learning, and personal fulfillment.
🧭 Career & Technical Growth
1. Solidify Your AI Engineering Identity You’ve already used ~1B tokens with Claude Code/OpenRouter and trained nanoGPT on H200 GPUs. The next step is to move from consumer of AI tools to builder of AI products. Consider:
- Building and launching a small, monetizable AI SaaS product (even a niche tool used by 500 paying users is transformative).
- Publishing technical work on AI — even one well-cited blog post or a GitHub project with 1,000+ stars can dramatically raise your visibility.
2. Finish Your Associate Degree — Then Keep Going You’ve completed 13 out of ~18 courses. Finish it. It’s not just a credential — completing things you start builds personal integrity and signals follow-through to employers. After that, consider:
- Attempting a self-study bachelor’s degree or open university pathway if time allows.
- Using your IELTS 6.5 to potentially apply for remote opportunities at international companies or even study abroad programs.
3. Aim for Senior/Staff Engineer Track at a Major Firm You’re currently at TEKsystems/HSBC. To grow beyond outsourced contracting:
- Target a direct hire senior engineer role at a top-tier tech company (domestic or international), which would increase your income, visibility, and leverage significantly.
- Your top 6% Copilot usage internally and AIPlayer contribution award are strong signals — document these as quantifiable wins for future job searches.
4. Open Source and International Visibility You have solid GitHub presence but mostly personal projects. Consider:
- Contributing meaningfully to a well-known open-source project (Spring, LangChain, etc.) — even 10 accepted PRs positions you internationally.
- Writing technical posts in English that get traction on HN or dev.to to build a global audience beyond your 60k/year Chinese blog visitors.
💰 Financial Growth
5. Build Wealth Systematically Your resume mentions crypto and NVDA investing since 2018 with some good recent gains (25–30%). The next level:
- Automate regular investing (DCA) in diversified ETFs (e.g., S&P 500, QQQ) as a foundation, alongside your higher-risk crypto/stock bets.
- With your engineering salary and freelancing background, target a savings rate above 40–50% for the next 3–5 years while expenses are low.
- Consider your next entrepreneurial product seriously — you’ve had a startup with 30k users and 3M RMB revenue before. You have the skills to do it again, smarter this time.
🧠 Learning & Intellectual Life
6. Go Deep, Not Just Wide You’ve read 320+ books and consumed 8,000 long AI answers — impressive breadth. The next stage is depth with output:
- Turn your 3 vision restoration papers into a more widely read body of work — submit to a preprint server (arXiv) or a health/ophthalmology blog with large readership.
- Pick one area of CS (e.g., distributed systems, LLM inference, or compilers) and go deep enough to write something genuinely novel.
7. Learn Japanese More Seriously You mention Japanese as under 1 year experience and learning through TikTok/music. If you invest 30 minutes/day seriously (Anki + structured grammar), you can reach conversational level (N3/N2) in 2 years — opening up Japan as a potential career or travel option given your profile.
🏃 Health & Longevity
8. Make Health a Priority System, Not Just a Hack You’re clearly a life hacker (air fryer, EMF meter, vision restoration experiments). Apply that same rigor to longevity:
- Establish consistent sleep, exercise, and dietary baselines — these compound over decades more powerfully than any career move.
- Your vision research is impressive. Consider whether it’s worth documenting as a longer-form guide or even a short book — it might help thousands of people and raise your public intellectual profile.
👨👩👧 Family & Relationships
9. Invest in Your Daughter’s Development Deliberately You already bring a second phone to help her learn English — that’s thoughtful. In the next few years:
- Consider bilingual homeschooling supplements or English immersion programs.
- Model lifelong learning visibly for her — kids who see parents reading, building, and exploring become curious adults.
10. Deepen Your Network Intentionally You’ve had Y Combinator exposure (second round is top ~3%), LinkedIn presence, and connections in tech. But networks decay without investment:
- Reconnect with your YC batch contacts and past co-founders.
- Join 1–2 high-quality communities (e.g., a professional AI Slack group, a startup community, or an international tech forum) where you contribute regularly.
🌍 Travel & Life Experience
11. Plan One Major International Experience Per Year You’ve been to the USA twice and traveled widely in China. Given your English level and international outlook:
- Consider working remotely from Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Thailand) for a month — low cost, great quality of life, growing tech scene.
- Japan is an obvious next destination given your language study.
🎯 The 3-Year North Star Summary
| Area | Target in 3 Years |
|---|---|
| Career | Senior/Staff Engineer or Founding Engineer at a direct-hire tech company |
| Product | 1 live AI product with real users or revenue |
| Open Source | 1 major repo with 500+ GitHub stars |
| Finance | Automated investing, savings rate >40%, emergency fund secured |
| Education | Associate degree completed |
| Health | Consistent exercise/sleep system in place |
| Languages | Japanese N3 level |
| Family | Daughter in a structured bilingual learning path |
The biggest leverage point for you is probably this: you already have exceptional breadth and work ethic — the gap is in focused, public output that compounds. Write more in English, ship one real product, and go deeper in one technical domain. That combination will unlock significantly more opportunity in every dimension of life.